How Recipe Videos Colonized Your Facebook Feed

In June of last year, Andrew Ilnyckyj, a video producer at BuzzFeed, was filming the preparation of the All Day Breakfast Burger. After piling layers of bacon, a fried egg, and bourbon-infused syrup onto a cheese-covered patty, a hand reached into the frame to add the top half of a tater-tot bun. As the bun landed, a drop of golden yolk slithered onto the plate. “Oh, yes!” Ilnyckyj exclaimed, ecstatic.

That exclamation now punctuates every video produced by Tasty, which has, in less than a year, become BuzzFeed’s most popular page on Facebook, with more than fifty-five million likes. Its videos, which are about a minute long, have a simple aesthetic: a combination of stop-motion shots, simple onscreen instructions, and colorful ingredients and cooking tools. Most of the clips garner hundreds of thousands of likes; hundreds, if not thousands, of comments; and hundreds of thousands more views on YouTube. Tasty has done this, counterintuitively, by decoupling itself, to a strong degree, from the BuzzFeed brand.

To get a sense of how and why the company managed this trick, in March I met with Andrew Gauthier, an executive video producer and the creative brain behind Tasty, at BuzzFeed’s offices in Manhattan. Tall and gaunt, he greeted me wearing a sunshine-yellow summer-camp shirt, his blond tresses woven into Heidi braids. He apologized for not knowing his way around. He’s based in Los Angeles and was in town to plan out Tasty’s next moves.

Gauthier told me that the site began as an experiment. In the summer of 2014, his team was posting lifehacking videos to BuzzFeed Food’s YouTube channel, with the aim of seeing which ones went viral when they were posted to Facebook. Video viewership was increasing rapidly on Facebook at the time, thanks largely to its rollout of autoplay as a default setting for users’ news feeds. The team observed that one series of videos, which offered eating tips (think: “6 Fruits You’re Eating Wrong”), was doing especially well. In hopes of developing another successful first-person how-to series, they began producing short recipe spots consisting of shaky, phone-shot quick cuts showing ingredients being assembled into dishes like the 3-Ingredient Beer Dip. These posts proved exceptionally popular, too. The recipe genre is tried and true, but, Gauthier said, they felt they’d hit on something “new and fresh and cool.”

For months, BuzzFeed Food’s popularity on Facebook continued to rise. Then, the following summer, as Facebook was adjusting its news-feed algorithm to promote videos that users interacted with in some fashion, the food-video team decided to try something different. “We had this idea: Could we launch something totally from scratch?” Gauthier recalled. “Without the halo of the brand?”

The notion of starting a stand-alone site without obvious benefit to (or from) the parent brand is unusual. BuzzFeed’s own representatives couldn’t articulate a clear case for why they’d gone in that direction. The rationale seemed to be to focus solely on what people would like and share on Facebook—to give the section a snappy name and try to build on the strength of the videos themselves, rather than linking it, for better or worse, to BuzzFeed’s existing social-media presence. And so, last July, Gauthier and his team launched Tasty, a Facebook-driven page that acknowledged its parent outlet with only a tiny “From BuzzFeed” insignia in the corner and a Facebook URL that ended with “buzzfeedtasty.” Even the link to the Tasty page on buzzfeed.com is obscured by a URL shortener.

Tasty’s videos have improved markedly on the aesthetics of BuzzFeed Food’s initial attempts at recipe tutorials. Each step is now fastidiously choreographed. But Tasty retains the simple frames, quick cuts, and first-person perspective of BuzzFeed Food’s recipe videos. The production team believes that younger viewers, in particular, care more about accessibility than about the fancy touches associated with gourmet cooking. “The process has to be as real as possible,” Gauthier said. The result is crisp, clean visuals of flour sputtering out of bowls, drops of batter escaping their pans, and imperfect vegetable cuts. The team’s goal for its first month after launching was to get five hundred thousand Facebook likes; it got 1.2 million.

Aesthetics would certainly seem to account for some of the popularity of the videos. At this year’s SXSW Interactive Festival, Frank Cooper, BuzzFeed’s chief marketing and creative officer, described Tasty’s visuals as key to his company’s ambition to build “the largest food network in the world.” “You’ve got about sixty seconds from the first ingredient to the final product,” he said. “And even if you can’t cook … you watch, and it becomes very addictive.”

Ze Frank, the president of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, told me that dramatic tension is key to this effect. He suggested, in particular, that the visuals are constructed to convey a concise narrative arc, building rapidly toward that “Oh, yes!” moment. Gauthier agreed with this analysis, and added that the videos’ instrumental soundtracks, which are often preposterously jazzy or perkily electric, are geared to this build, too. The soundtrack is less important than the images, though—Tasty paid close attention to the fact that Facebook’s autoplay feature rolls videos silently by default. If the images didn’t captivate people, they would scroll on. “We were really thinking of audio independence,” Frank said. “What kind of videos would work seamlessly within a product like that and allow you share with your friends?”

From the first video, amateur cooks were posting photos and comments about how recipes turned out, offering tweaks and substitutions. Gauthier showed me one comment, from last October, that showed a series of four photos of a little girl making peanut-butter balls. This provided the inspiration for a brand extension, and, soon afterward, they launched Tasty Junior, a series featuring side-by-side shots of children and parents cooking pizza, tacos, cookies, and other foods together. Other comments led Tasty to start posting a Mom vs. Chef series—an “Iron Chef”–like competition in which a mother tries to out-cook a professional chef.

A couple of media strategists who have been studying Tasty’s success on Facebook told me that the company’s ultimate weapon is its microfocus. “What Tasty and BuzzFeed have figured out is the niche,” Katie Miller, the social-media director at the Minneapolis-based media-strategy firm ICF Olson, told me. “They’ll target people interested in snails, or a certain dance video, or people who eat tater tots in Minnesota.”

Facebook is famously secretive about the algorithmic formula that pushes certain posts to the valuable real estate at the top of your newsfeed. But outlets such as BuzzFeed were attuned to its moves to promote videos that succeed according to metrics including comments, shares, and likes, which emphasize user engagement. The greater the level of engagement, the more likely Facebook is to promote the work. “For video posts, the metrics count: how long a person has watched a video, what they’re doing with the video after watching it,” Miller’s colleague, Samantha Campbell, said. This new emphasis gives the tater-tot eaters of Minnesota disproportionate power.

But how does clicking “like” or sharing a taco dip with your best friend translate into money? Frank said that the company was still trying to figure that out, but he said that sponsored editorial spots would be Tasty’s main source of revenue. Since November, BuzzFeed has been showcasing food brands in about a third of its posts. In March, it featured an Oster grill in a recipe for Jalapeño Popper Burgers. Within hours, the grill had sold out on Amazon and Target.com.

Already, too, there are franchises: international variants that feature local ingredients and on-the-ground shoots, such as Proper Tasty, launched late last year in the U.K., and Brazil’s Tasty Demais, which launched in February. BuzzFeed is also applying the approach to other subjects. In March, it launched Nifty, a do-it-yourself channel; the ensuing avalanche of enthusiasm caused Facebook to temporarily disable likes for the page, in the mistaken belief that they were coming from bots. The video team is also attempting to replicate its viral success on more image-friendly platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. The challenge of making money from all of this remains, but, for now, BuzzFeed appears to be content to keep expanding its reach. “It’s always about how the ingredients—pardon the pun—come together to create these opportunities,” Frank said.